Thomas Foster was born in May 1849 in the hamlet of Friday Bridge on the outskirts of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. He was one of the six children of Norfolk-born Thomas Foster senior (1822-1896) who was variously a farmer, railway worker and millwright’s assistant, and Susannah Batterham née Greeves (1823-1902).1–7

Thomas junior moved from Wisbech to Lincoln some time around 1870 and married Hannah Cass Bassett there in 1876.7

Hannah was born in Lincoln in 1855; she was the eldest child of Edwin Bassett, a tailor originally from Shropshire, and Lincoln native Margaret L. Cass.3,4,7 Hannah grew up on West Bight in uphill Lincoln;3 before her marriage to Thomas Foster she worked as a household servant at Mr Mantle’s school for choristers in Northgate (the forerunner of the current Minster School).4,8

After their marriage Thomas worked as a house painter, and the couple moved to number 63 Burton Road in the city in about the year 1900.5,6,9,10 They had seven children: Eliza, Louisa, Harry Edward, Fred*, Margaret, William Bassett**, and Jennie.7,11

Thomas Foster died in Lincoln in June 1931 at the age of 82; his widow Hannah Foster in March 1941, aged 86.7,11,12They both received funerals at St Nicholas’ Church on Newport and were buried in plot D.310 in Newport Cemetery, along with their oldest daughter Eliza who died in 1965. Records show that there was a headstone but it has disappeared.12

*Fred Foster (1884-1957) was the father of John Thomas Foster (1909-1992).10

**William Bassett Foster became a Private in the 1/4th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, and fought in World War One. He was killed in the “useless slaughter of infantry” of the Battle of the Hohenzollern Redoubt at Loos on 13th October 1915, aged 26, and is commemorated on the Loos Memorial in northern France as well as the city war memorial on Lincoln High Street.13,14